


Past the Gates of the Dreamers' City

by 23Murasaki



Series: (re)Written!Verse [11]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: But that's about it for sketchy things, Content Warning: Vaguely Gross Descriptions Of Monsters, Dreamscapes, Dreamsharing, Gen, Lovecraftian Elements, Talking To Dead People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 06:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13452435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: The Maclay women are demons with magic in their blood, and when they dream they walk in unknown places. Tara wanders further afield than most.(Or: Buffyverse/Angelverse is a cosmic horror story and I will gladly write you a dissertation on why, but in the mean time please enjoy a wee Tara wandering the Dreamworld.)





	Past the Gates of the Dreamers' City

Tara is eight the first time she meets the Lord of the Dreamers' City. She is wandering the dream, wandering with a candle and her long blonde hair in plaits and her lilac pajamas with little bows. He appears out of nowhere, between the buildings that bend and twist at angles Tara can't process, and He is tall and beautiful, but horrible, and when she looks up at Him to see why He makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end she sees He has a golden mask with no face underneath it, and when she looks away she sees His shadow cast in thousands of brilliant colors.

Tara's a demon, her father says, but her mother says she's a smart little girl, and either way she takes one look at Him and turns around and flees for her life. She runs down the streets that He brought with Him, opal cobblestones and high spires and false angles and windows you don't look through, and the gate that looks like teeth and golden things opens up in front of her just wide enough to fit her. On the other side is... something, but anything is better company than Him so she flings herself through the gate and into the open air.

"Speedy little thing," says a man's voice, and Tara jumps. On the other side of the gate, the one where she is now, there are parts of the ground you can't step on because they're alive, and there's eyeballs in places and there's a young man who looks like he's had his head chopped off and then put back on with cheap glue.

"There was a... with a mask," she says, breathless. "In, in..."

"In the city?" the guy with the cut off head prompts. Tara nods. "Yeah. You're a brave kid, going in there."

"I didn't go," says Tara. "I just...I was."

"Were you? Little dreamer." He says that like it means something.

"Are you dreaming?" she asks.

"No, kid," he says. "I'm dead."

"Oh," says Tara, who isn't sure what to say to that. "I'm, I'm a demon."

"Wicked cool," says the dead man. "Isn't this a good place to be?" And he smiles at her and offers his arm like he's something from a fairytale, only fairytale princes weren't dead and also, well, probably didn't wear clothes that were torn up and patched with skulls and things and probably didn't have tattoos. Tara takes his arm anyway, with all the seriousness of an eight year old, and together they navigate the living ground and walk until they find somewhere nicer to be.

She doesn't meet the Lord in the Dreamers' City again for a long time after that, but meets her friend with the chopped off head fairly regularly. He's nice. Her mother says not to tell anyone your name in the dream, so he calls her Kitty and asks her about the magicks she and her mother weave. It's easier on the dream, and she makes tiny fairy lights dance about in the air and he grins and makes flowers bloom twice as big and vivid purple and blue and pink.

"You-you're magic!" Tara exclaims when he does that, and he laughs aloud.

"Not really," he tells her. "I'm not magic, I just studied it. Not a dreamer, just staying here. Not alive, just talking." The dream-flowers fade under his fingers, and Tara mumbles apologies. "None of that now, Kitty. No sorries and no tears. It's just the truth. I'm not magic like you are. But, listen, Kitty, don't cry, listen, I had a friend when I was alive, this guy. You'd like him, I think. He was magic."

Her mother comes with her, sometimes, and the dream gives her mother long, shiny hair and legs that can walk without trouble. The young dead man is always polite, in his own clumsy way, and says that Kitty and Mama Cat are his favorite visitors.

"Quite a complement," says Tara's mother, laughing like she never does when she's awake.

"Not really," says the dead man with a crooked smile. "Don't get many visitors." Tara's mother smiles at him like they have a secret and tells him she likes cats. Tara likes them too.

She grows, and wonders if she changes. The dream doesn't, certainly, and her dead companion is ageless and eternally, he says, nineteen. To an eight year old, that's ancient. To a thirteen year old, that's close. She thinks one day she'll look at him and see someone her own age, and one day he'll look at her and see the monster she really is.

She's thirteen when she and the dead man cross the dream and stand before a temple that's full, Tara thinks, of cats. Or creatures that look like cats, at least, because you can never be sure in the dream. They're furry and soft and they wind around her legs purring and pointedly ignore her friend.

"See, Kitty?" he says, laughing. "This is your place. Where the Dreamers' City can't reach and where cats can tell people's futures."

"My future..?" Tara muses, kneeling to stroke the cats, and they respond in a cacophony of meows that she doesn't understand but desperately wants to.

"Sure," says the dead man. "If you speak dream-cat."

The next night she sees the Lord in the Dreamers' City again, finds herself on opal cobblestones again, and the looming creature with the prism-bright shadow and the golden mask looks down at her.

"You aren't one of mine, little dreamer," He says, and Tara thinks He's amused by all this. "What brings you here?"

"I don't want to be here," Tara tells Him. "I didn't come on purpose."

"But there is always purpose," says the Lord in the Dreamers' City. "Bothersome, really. I suppose I shall see you when you are grown--pray that you meet me here, Tara Maclay, and not in my myriad other forms."

She wants to answer, but instead she wakes like she's been thrown into her body from a very great height.

Tara is sixteen when her mother dies and she sobs herself to sleep hidden in an alcove her father can't reach. When she opens her eyes in the dream, there is a cat watching her. There are cats watching her. They sit in orderly rows, still as statues, and Tara remembers being told that they can see the future.

"Excuse me," she says very quietly, and her voice is rough from crying. The cats seem to nod at her to go on, so she swallows hard and continues. "Excuse me, is, is my mom in here?"

But her mother is dead in a coffin and not wandering the dream, because she died in the waking world and never gave over her soul, if demon-women have souls, to the Dreamers' City and its master, to the things native to this side of consciousness. The cats take Tara to a temple where she can pray for her mother and weep and stand where she once stood, but they don't bring her mother back.

She's sixteen when the dead man, who no longer looks so grown-up, really, he's only a little older than her, hears her story and pats her on the head.

"Kitty, Kitty," he murmurs. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry she's not here. But that's how we make do, you see. I'm told life goes on."

And her friend will be nineteen forever and he's long dead and wandering the dream, and her mother is dead and buried and unreachable, and Tara is all alone in the world.

In the dream, creatures plot the course of stars to sail red seas beyond the Dreamers' City. When Tara wakes, dry-eyed, to stars at her window she thinks there is a clarity there. She can chart her own path, across waking cities and land and blue water if need be, she can catch the winds in her sails and run until she is home, until she is home for the first time in her life.

**Author's Note:**

> ... Okay, you get an internet cookie if you can guess who Tara's Dreamland-friend is.


End file.
